Featured on The TV Book Club on More4 on 14 February 2010.

This is a masterly debut novel, visceral in its power, heartbreaking in its tenderness. Transporting the reader from the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, "Cutting for Stone" is a thrilling epic of conjoined twins, doctors and patients, temptation and redemption, home and exile - and a riveting family story, irresistibly charged with strange happenings, humour and pathos, that grabs you from its harrowing opening and never lets go.

Synopsis

Marion and Shiva Stone, born in a mission hospital in Ethiopia in the 1950s, are twin sons of an illicit union between an Indian nun and British doctor. Bound by birth but with widely different temperaments they grow up together, in a country on the brink of revolution, until a betrayal splits them apart. But fate has not finished with them - they will be brought together once more, in the sterile surroundings of a hospital theatre. From the 1940s to the present, from a convent in India to a cargo ship bound for the Yemen, from a tiny operating theatre in Ethiopia to a hospital in the Bronx, this is both a richly visceral epic and a riveting family story.

Reviews

A human story that is deeply moving, utterly gripping, and, indeed, unforgettable. Cutting for Stone is as noble and dramatic as that ancient practice--medicine--that lies at the heart of this magnificent novel John Burnham Schwartz, author of The Commoner and Reservation Road

About the Author

Born and brought up of Indian parents in Ethiopia, Abraham Verghese qualified as a doctor in Madras and is currently professor of medicine at Stanford University, California. He is the author of My Own Country, an NBCC finalist made into a film directed by Mira Nair, and The Tennis Partner, a New York Times Notable Book. His essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Granta, New York Times Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Palo Alto, California. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation